Thursday, July 16, 2009

Joining with Clever Educators at the Apple Distinguished Educator Institute

Sometimes my creative life overlaps with my life as an educator and I just have to share! I just got back from 5 amazing days in Orlando at the Apple Distinguished Educator Summer Institute. I joined with 150 of the most creative educators in the the country to learn about the latest ideas in education and technology. We met at Full Sail University and enjoyed using their high tech facilities to stretch our knowledge and skills.

During the five days we had the opportunity to tour Full Sail and talk to many of their students. We took some specialized classes and had fascinating presentations from Jayson Witmore and from Ray Zahab about the Impossible 2 Possible. One of the most unique opportunites that we had was a photo shoot with Pulitzer Prize winning photographer Bill Frakes. Yes, I felt like America's Next Top Model!

Apple always feeds us well at these conferences! We had lots of great desserts - loved these little mini parfaits in shots glasses!

And isn't this the most unique presentation for a salad?

Part of the institute was working on a small group project on personalized learning. My group was the best - we worked on developing a model for training elementary teachers in Challenge Based Learning. One of the highlights was working in the green screen studio - I haven't laughed that hard in a long time!

Here is the video that our team developed to introduce our project - Ann and Linda rocked at putting this together!!

And here is the outtake from our filming - probably no one else will find this funny, but it left us rolling!

My complete set of images from the institute are here at Flickr. My deepest thanks to Apple Computers for putting together another incredible learning experience!

I am impressed! You'll seem to have had fun making the videos too. How do you get to be in the group that went to that Apple convention? So glad to know that teachers are recognized for their hard work. It's a good motivational seminar.

Yaya Oechid, you have to apply to be a part of the Apple Distinguished Educators and be selected. I was accepted into the group 2 years ago and then had to apply as an alumni this year to attend the conference again. There are about 700 ADEs in the US, and only 150 were selected to attend this conference. It was an awesome experience to attend!